"The first general treatment of women in the ancient world to reflect the critical insights of modern feminism. Though much debated, its position as the basic textbook on women's history in Greece and Rome has hardly been challenged."--Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement. Illustrations. From the Trade Paperback edition.

What did women do in ancient Greece and Rome? Did Socrates' wife Xanthippe ever hear his dialogues on beauty and truth? How many many women actually read the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides? When pagan goddesses were as powerful as gods, why was the status of women generally so low? Why, in traditional histories, is half the population effectively invisible? This unique and important book spans a period of 1500 years - from the fall of Troy to the death of Constantine. It examines all the available evidence - literary and archaeological - and reconstructs the lives of women from all classes of society.

" The first general treatment of women in the ancient world to reflect the critical insights of modern feminism. Though much debated, its position as the basic textbook on women's history in Greece and Rome has hardly been challenged." --Mary Beard, Times Literary Supplement. Illustrations.

This is the first book-length examination of Spartan women, covering over a thousand years in the history of women from both the elite and lower classes. Classicist Sarah B. Pomeroy comprehensively analyzes ancient texts and archaeological evidence to construct the world of these elusive though much noticed females. Sparta has always posed a challenge to ancient historians because information about the society is relatively scarce. Most existing scholarship on Sparta concerns the military history of the city and its heavily male-dominated social structure--almost as if there were no women in Sparta. Yet perhaps the most famous of mythic Greek women, Menelaus' wife Helen, the cause of the Trojan War, was herself a Spartan. Written by one of the leading authorities on women in antiquity, Spartan Women reconstructs the lives and the world of Sparta's women, including how their status changed over time and how they held on to their surprising autonomy. Proceeding through the archaic, classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods, Spartan Women includes discussions of education, family life, reproduction, religion, and athletics.

Information about women is scattered throughout the fragmented mosaic of ancient history: the vivid poetry of Sappho survived antiquity on remnants of damaged papyrus; the inscription on a beautiful fourth century B.C.E. grave praises the virtues of Mnesarete, an Athenian woman who died young; a great number of Roman wives were found guilty of poisoning their husbands, but was it accidental food poisoning, or disease, or something more sinister. Apart from the legends of Cleopatra, Dido and Lucretia, and images of graceful maidens dancing on urns, the evidence about the lives of women of the classical world--visual, archaeological, and written--has remained uncollected and uninterpreted. Now, the lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched Women in the Classical World lifts the curtain on the women of ancient Greece and Rome, exploring the lives of slaves and prostitutes, Athenian housewives, and Rome's imperial family. The first book on classical women to give equal weight to written texts and artistic representations, it brings together a great wealth of materials--poetry, vase painting, legislation, medical treatises, architecture, religious and funerary art, women's ornaments, historical epics, political speeches, even ancient coins--to present women in the historical and cultural context of their time. Written by leading experts in the fields of ancient history and art history, women's studies, and Greek and Roman literature, the book's chronological arrangement allows the changing roles of women to unfold over a thousand-year period, beginning in the eighth century B.C.E. Both the art and the literature highlight women's creativity, sexuality and coming of age, marriage and childrearing, religious and public roles, and other themes. Fascinating chapters report on the wild behavior of Spartan and Etruscan women and the mythical Amazons; the changing views of the female body presented in male-authored gynecological treatises; the "new woman" represented by the love poetry of the late Republic and Augustan Age; and the traces of upper- and lower-class life in Pompeii, miraculously preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. Provocative and surprising, Women in the Classical World is a masterly foray into the past, and a definitive statement on the lives of women in ancient Greece and Rome.

In Pythagorean Women, classical scholar Sarah B. Pomeroy discusses the groundbreaking principles that Pythagoras established for family life in Archaic Greece, such as constituting a single standard of sexual conduct for women and men. Among the Pythagoreans, women played an important role and participated actively in the philosophical life. While Pythagoras encouraged women to be submissive to men, his reasoning was based on the desire to preserve harmony in the home. Pythagorean Women provides English translations of all the earliest extant examples of literary Greek prose by Neopythagorean women, shedding light on their attitudes about marriage, the home, music, and the cosmos. Pomeroy sets the Pythagorean and Neopythagorean women vividly in their historical, ecological, and intellectual contexts, illustrated with original photographs of sites and artifacts known to these women.

This collection of essays explores the lives and roles of women in antiquity. A recurring theme is the relationship between private and public, and many of the essays find that women's public roles develop as a result of their private lives, specifically their family relationships. Essays on Hellenistic queens and Spartan and Roman women document how women exerted political power--usually, but not always, through their relationship to male leaders--and show how political upheaval created opportunities for them to exercise powers previously reserved for men. Essays on the writings of Sappho and Nossis focus on the interaction between women's public and private discourses. The collection also includes discussion of Athenian and Roman marriage and the intrusion of the state into the sexual lives of Greek, Roman, and Jewish women as well as an investigation of scientific opinion about female physiology. The contributors are Sarah B. Pomeroy, Jane McIntosh Snyder, Marilyn M. Skinner, Cynthia B. Patterson, Ann Ellis Hanson, Lesley Dean-Jones, Natalie Boymel Kampen, Mary Taliaferro Boatwright, and Shaye J.D. Cohen.

Largely excluded from any public role, the women of ancient Greece nonetheless appear in various guises in the art and writing of the period, and in legal documents. These representations reveal a great deal about women's day-to-day experience as well as their legal and economic position - and how they were regarded by men.

The study of gender in classical antiquity has undergone rapid and wide-ranging development in the past. The contributors reassess the role of women in diverse contexts and areas, such as archaic and classical Greek literature and cult, Roman imperial politics, ancient medicine and early Christianity. Some offer detailed interpretations of topics which have been widely discussed since the 1960s whilst others highlight recent areas of research. This study reflects and expands on existing scholarly debates on the status and representation of women in the ancient world, focusing on methodology, and suggesting areas for future research and improvement.

One of the reasons for the study of the Greek and Roman classics is their perpetual relevance. In no area can this position be more clearly defended than in the investigation of the feminine condition, for it was here that basic attitudes derogatory to the sex were molded by legal and social systems, by philosophers and poets, and by the thinking of men long since gone. Women in the Ancient World brings together essays that examine philosophy, social history, literature, and art, and that extend from the early Greek period through the Roman Empire. Their wide range of critical perspectives throws new light on the personal, political, socio-economic, and cultural position of women.

This highly acclaimed collection provides a unique look into the public and private lives and legal status of Greek and Roman women of all social classes-from wet nurses, prostitutes, and gladiatrixes to poets, musicians, intellectuals, priestesses, and housewives. The third edition adds new texts to sections throughout the book, vividly describing women's sentiments and circumstances through readings on love, bereavement, and friendship, as well as property rights, breast cancer, female circumcision, and women's roles in ancient religions, including Christianity and pagan cults.

This book examines the daily lives of Roman women by focusing on the mundane and less celebrated aspects of daily life - family and household, work and leisure, worship and social obligations - of women of different social ranks. Using a variety of sources, including literary texts, letters, inscriptions, coins, tableware, furniture, and the fine arts, from the late Republic to the high Imperial period, Eve D'Ambra shows how these sources serve as objects of social analysis, rather than simply as documents that recreate how life was lived. She also demonstrates how texts and material objects take part in shaping realities and what they can tell us about the texture of lives and social attitudes, if not emotions of women in Roman antiquity.

Expanded and updated for this English-language translation, this book offers the first history of women in ancient Greece and Rome to be written from a legal perspective. Cantarella demonstrates how literary, anecdotal. and judicial sources can and cannot be used to discover that Greek and Roman men thought about women.
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